Daniel Clayton Winsett

Mr. Winsett was born in 1847. His obituary appeared on May 21, 1936. What I’ve been able to find of him isn’t much, however, according to his obituary, he did attend 42 Confederate Veteran Reunions.

Obituary Text: Uncle Dan Winsett. LITTLE ROCK, Ark., May 21 (AP). Dan Clayton (Uncle Dan) Winsett, 90-year-old Negro, former slave and body servant to Gen. Marmaduke during the War Between the States, died at the Arkansas Confederate home here today. Winsett had been living at the home since 1890. He attended forty-two Confederate reunions and had plained to attend the reunion at Shreveport next month.
You will almost never find a white Confederate referred to as “Uncle”. Uncle and Aunt were a diminutives for older slaves to show respect.

You might be wondering, what else do we know about Daniel Winsett? If you are a member of the Confederate Sons of Veterans all you need to know is that he was a slave in War Between the States and isn’t that actually just a word for soldier?

I hope you said yes, because that’s what Daniel Winsett’s tombstone says even though contemporary articles at the time identified him as a slave.

There’s a touching paragraph there about how he lived in the Confederate Veteran’s home in Arkansas for 30 years and he was the only African American resident. You might be thinking, that seems odd given the Southern Heritage experts who say there were likely hundreds of thousands of “Black Confederates”.

There’s also video of Daniel Winsett saying he served as the body servant (slave) of General Marmaduke (John S.) and Jo Shelby (Joseph O. Shelby) of Arkansas. He states he was their bodyguard (which is another position slaves held at the time.)

In language typical of all soldiers (and certainly not slaves) at the time, Winsett says, “That he done everything General Marmaduke and Jo Shelby told him to. One day General Marmaduke told me to go out and get some chickens.”

He told the general, “I don’t know what is going on.” The General told him, “Looks like there’s red caps over there.” And in typical “soldiering” fashion, he told General Marmaduke, “Yessir, I’ll go right now, right now.”

Proof he attended the reunions.

Mr. Winsett appears in Confederate Veteran magazine several times. Looking at his census records, it looks like his wife died and then he went into the Veteran’s Home after being a boarder for a few years.

That story is kind of sad, so us Southron Heritage lovers rewrote his history as a slave and gave him a tombstone more befitting for someone we don’t care to learn about beyond their service to their masters in the Confederacy.

I know that I’d much rather have my kids think there were black soldiers who devoted themselves to the Confederacy of their own free will facing no coercion from a pro-slavery government, than black slaves who had no legal rights who were bound by law to follow their masters.